WIP - Dummy book pages
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Hi, everyone! I've recently signed back up to take some classes as I'm developing a dummy book for a picture book I am working on. I wanted to share the first 3 pages. Hoping to have it finished over the next month.
My daughter wrote the original story and I made some rewrites. Learning a lot watching the courses as I create this.
I hope everyone is creating something awesome!
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What a fun concept! I also like the character design and rendering. I have three points for your consideration.
- It seems you have a very large bleed compared to the size of the pages. Unless the book is tiny, you don’t need such a large safety space. The standard bleed size is 0.25“.
- While you vary the point of view nicely in the third, your character is always straight on in all three drawings. You may consider changing not only the expression but also the orientation of the character to the viewer and give a little bit more movement to the posture. Straight on views are often a bit stiff, and here it gives a sense of repetitiveness.
- You have three pages that look like they come in sequence and are all half-spread size and full bleed. Normally it’s advisable to avoid putting two full-bleed pages side-by-side in a spread, as it tends to look „cluttered“. That´s why often a full bleed page is accompanied by one or more vignettes on the other side. There are exceptions of course, but since you start off this way I was wondering wether you have thumbnailed your book throughout - which helps to decide which illustrations are to be for a spread, which for a page and which are vignettes.
Looking forward to see the rest of the story!
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@michael-regina Looks like a fun project. I did a book with my son that wrote the story. It was a lot of fun to work on it together. He was like a little art director LOL. Looking forward to seeing how it all comes together.
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@smceccarelli Thank you o much for your comments! I definitely agree that I need to go back through and maybe revisit some of the pages to make sure the illustrations are varying up more throughout the book. I'm not particularly happy with the second page in particular.
I laid out the whole book and there are some pages that aren't full splash pages, but they're not as frequent for sure.
@Chip-Valecek Working with your kids is a blast! I definitely had to go back in and do some rewrites though, because the idea was really interesting, but there were story edits that needed some working out.
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Cute! I like the interesting angle in the third frame. What a fun idea to do it with your kiddo! One thing that stuck out to me was that the little kid has a pretty mature and masculine face. Some things you could try, make the eyes bigger and bring them down and closer together. Bring the ears down too and shrink them. Maybe aim for more of a button style nose and play with less defined eyebrows. Kids have pretty round faces, with big eyes. Another thing you can do is part the hair on the side for a more appealing look.
